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Retrospectives

Frederick Wiseman is a pillar of American documentary, yet much of his work has historically been difficult to view in a high-quality format. For the first 40 years of his expansive career, Wiseman shot each of his deep-diving, sometimes epic-length explorations of various institutions on 16mm, not transitioning to digital until the late 2000s. Over the course of five years and in collaboration between Wiseman’s company Zipporah Films and the Library of Congress, the Harvard Film Archive, the late DuArt Film Lab, and Goldcrest Post, 33 of his features—from his debut Titicut Follies (1967) to State Legislature (2006)—received 4K restorations. Beyond being a vital work of preservation for one of our most important documentarians, the effort has precipitated one of the biggest repertory cinema events of the year in cities on multiple continents. Amidst these retrospectives, we sat down to speak with Wiseman over the phone about the restoration process, his literary influences, and how newer audiences have received his work.
Working from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Mexican director Paul Leduc (1942–2020) built a multifaceted oeuvre, ranging from agitprop pamphlets
“ As filmmakers we do not set out in search of definition. We consider that the daily life of these men, their stories and the culture they have